Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia: Performing Politics

Introduction

Performances, Possibilities, and Practices of the Political in Central Asia

Johan Rasanayagam, Judith Beyer, and Madeleine Reeves

What does politics look like in Central Asia? How is politics performed, and what is at stake? How should we, in fact, understand the political as a sphere of activity and what sort of object is the state, in Central Asia or elsewhere? Central Asia, in this collection, refers to the five former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, as well as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China. The post-Soviet Central Asian republics are relatively recent creations. Their territorial boundaries were established under Bolshevik rule in the 1920s, carved out of the former Tsarist administrative entity of Turkestan and the protectorates of Bukhara and Khiva. Soviet nationalities policy classified Central Asian populations into ethno-national groups, each associated with a distinct linguistic, cultural, and historical lineage and a defined territory. While not entirely arbitrary, Soviet policy and practice reified previously fluid registers of identification and belonging, and in some cases created entirely new nationality categories.¹ Those ethno-national groups that were regarded as most advanced along a supposed evolutionary trajectory toward nationhood—the Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, and Turkmens—were constituted as national republics within the framework of the Soviet Union.

When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, its Central Asian republics were abruptly cut loose from the economic and political infrastructure that had sustained them. The ideological frame that had located individual citizens within an encompassing polity was lost along with it. The national leaderships were forced to reinvent their republics as independent nation-states. They have sought to fashion new state ideologies and narratives of nationhood. Central Asian populations have had to cope with the collapse of previous certainties; the abrupt withdrawal of the state provision of employment, housing, and social welfare; and the ensuing material hardship (Kandiyoti and Mandel 1998). They have had to negotiate within new modes and practices of governance. This dynamic moment of invention and creative negotiation makes Central Asia a particularly productive site for comparative study of the political and the state.

The inclusion of China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in this volume provides an important comparative perspective. The region is territorially contiguous with the former Soviet republics, the populations have much in common, linguistically and culturally, and there are Uyghur populations in many of the former Soviet states, particularly in Kazakhstan. The continuing experience of the Chinese version of socialism, moreover, provides an illuminating point of comparison with the post-Soviet situation, as Ildikó Bellér-Hann’s contribution to this volume makes clear.²

The five post-Soviet Central Asian states share a common historical legacy of seven decades of Soviet communism, but they have experienced the two post-Soviet decades in their own, distinct ways. Tajikistan’s experience has been most traumatic. There, civil war broke out shortly after independence in 1992 and lasted through much of that decade. John Heathershaw, one of the contributors to this volume, identifies four broad explanations for conflict, although none of these are sufficient explanations in themselves: those that emphasize competition among ethno-regional solidarity groups (with an Uzbek-dominated western region and Tajik south and north); as a battle of ideologies between Communist Party conservatives, reformers, and nationalist and Islamist groups; as a struggle over recourses; and as a competition among elites, each with their patronage networks (Heathershaw 2009). A peace agreement was signed in 1997, but renegade commanders continued to be active until the early 2000s. Since 1992, Tajikistan has been under the authoritarian leadership of Emomali Rahmon, a former head of a state farm, initially as chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Tajikistan and later as president. As Heathershaw shows in his contribution to this volume, for all that Tajikistan has been celebrated as an example of successful post-conflict transition, the practical politics of peace-building over the last decade and a half has in many respects served to entrench and legitimize an authoritarian politics.

None of the former Soviet Central Asian republics can be described as liberal democracies that guarantee individual freedoms and support vibrant civil societies. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are the most authoritarian regimes, while Kyrgyzstan was, in the early years of independence, sometimes referred to by outside observers as an island of democracy in the region. The Soviet-era Communist Party leaderships of these republics continued as presidents of their independent states. President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan and Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan still remain in power, while the first president of independent Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, died in office in 2006, succeeded by Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov.

It is perhaps worth noting at this point the absent presence of Turkmenistan in this volume: it is the only Central Asian state on which we do not include a chapter. This absence is striking in view of the considerable interest of Turkmenistan to a comparative anthropology of the state in Central Asia and, in a context where popular paeans to the president are screened on prime-time television, for thinking about the diversity of ways in which politics is performed in the region. The lack of a chapter on Turkmenistan reflects less a deliberate editorial exclusion than the current realities of academic production on the region. Anthropologically informed articles and doctoral dissertations based on research in other Central Asian states, while hardly numerous when compared with the scale of scholarly output on other global regions, have nonetheless grown in number and scope over the previous decade (a decade, characteristic of this young field, in which eleven of the fourteen contributors to this volume received their doctorate). The same growth in scholarly production cannot be said of Turkmenistan. Writing in 2004, historian Adrienne Edgar noted the difficulties of conducting historical research in independent Turkmenistan, with the Turkmen State Archive remaining firmly off-limits to foreign researchers (Edgar 2004, xii). Nearly a decade later, the kind of sustained participant observation on which ethnographic research depends remains nearly impossible in Turkmenistan, and this is particularly true for any research that might address issues of everyday politics in a critical or questioning voice.

At the same time, scholarly production within Turkmenistan itself is highly circumscribed, with state-funded historical and archaeological research often deliberately conceived to give legitimacy to narratives of state continuity and national specificity that have already been articulated in presidential writings. The state, while a pervasive referent of official Turkmen discourse (along with the nation and the president), forms part of the hegemony of form (Yurchak 2006) in Turkmenistan that remains beyond sustained critical analysis. In September 2011, for instance, the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of Turkmenistan was instructed, by presidential decree, to conduct an international scientific conference on the Revival of the Great Silk Road in the Prosperous Epoch of the Powerful State: Deep Roots and Modern Opportunities. Such events, lavishly funded, internationally attended, and extensively rebroadcast, can themselves be considered an important mode of performing politics in Turkmenistan. They have yet, however, to receive the critical scholarly analysis they deserve.

If the political field in Turkmenistan has been characterized to a considerable degree by personalized rule, limited international collaboration, and relative political stability, Kyrgyzstan’s first two decades of independence are radically different. The country’s first post-independence president, Askar Akaev, was ousted in 2005 following mass protests sparked by the conduct of parliamentary elections. Kurmanbek Bakiev won the subsequent presidential elections, although he too was forced to resign after protests against his rule spread throughout Kyrgyzstan’s northern regions in the first half of 2010. Political upheaval was followed by violent conflict in June 2010, leaving many ordinary Kyrgyzstanis looking to Russia not just as a source of livelihood but as a model of a (presumed) stable, benign, and paternalist leadership.

In a comparative study of three of the Central Asian states, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, the political scientist Eric McGlinchey has sought to account for the differing paths of autocratic governance (McGlinchey 2011). He employs the usefully evocative labels Kyrgyz chaos, Uzbek violence, and Kazakh dynasty as shorthand descriptors for the variations in what he terms the patronage politics of these states. McGlinchey traces the different autocracies to three variables: the involvement of central Soviet authorities in mediating the leaderships of these republics in the Gorbachev era, the level of endowment of natural resources available to the Central Asian leaderships, and differing degrees of Islamist revivalism. Gorbachev managed change in the republican leaderships in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in the late 1980s, which meant that Karimov and Nazarbayev had a firm control on power at independence. By contrast, Gorbachev’s decision to stay aloof from the leadership contest in Kyrgyzstan in 1990 meant that no candidate emerged unchallenged, resulting in the unstable political situation. In addition, Nazarbayev and his family control Kazakhstan’s abundant oil wealth. It finances the president’s patronage networks and at the same time allows the regime to maintain relatively comfortable living standards for the population. Uzbekistan, on the other hand, has significantly smaller reserves of oil and gas, and coercive patronage politics is the rule. State repression and violence in Uzbekistan is further exacerbated, McGlinchey argues, by the threat the Karimov regime perceives in the emergence of Islamic networks and charities, which provide support and welfare in the absence of the state.

We have used the term authoritarian here as shorthand to describe Central Asian regimes. But power is not simply a capacity held by certain individuals to be exercised over others. The state is not an institution that exists in and of itself, separate from populations. And democracy is not simply a formal arrangement of legal frameworks, governing institutions, and procedures. The state constantly has to be performed into being—it takes shape through a host of actions, mundane and spectacular, in which ordinary people are enlisted as both audience and actor. Moments of profound political transformation do not simply undermine the coherence of the state. Rather, as Carol Greenhouse (2002) has argued, they expose with particular clarity the creative energy of ordinary people in maintaining the illusion of states’ concreteness (2002, 1). The contributors to this volume shed light on this work of constituting the state in the realm of the everyday. All of the contributors have engaged in many years of field research in Central Asia. Their essays are intimate explorations of how the state is experienced and produced in everyday encounters, of the capillary workings of politics, and they provide insights into the nature of contemporary authoritarianism. They suggest that what we call politics is performed. It is performed in, for example, the local conduct of elections (see Aksana Ismailbekova’s contribution), or poetry competitions (Eva-Marie Dubuisson’s chapter). The state itself is not an object or fact but materializes in the grand project of constructing a new capital in Kazakhstan (Mateusz Laszczkowski). It takes on particular qualities and shapes in the local operation of courts of elders in Kyrgyzstan (Judith Beyer) or in the attempts to relocate a cross-border market onto more obviously national territory by villagers who live along the newly relevant borders of independent nation-states (Madeleine Reeves).

The contributions to this volume speak from an anthropological perspective. This perspective is rooted in Central Asian lifeworlds but goes beyond simple ethnographic description. An anthropological perspective opens out to located experiences and practices of the political, to alternative ways of being and doing, and so encourages us to rethink our seemingly universal, taken-for-granted categories and assumptions. Our starting point is a broad conception of the political, as relations and interventions, often agonistic, that are enacted with a public dimension; they are performed in an arena, refer to discourses, or articulate with relations of power, which transcend the personal location of the actors involved. We do not conceive of the political with reference to pregiven categories, or assumed entities and actors, such as state and society, elites and the populace, political parties and interest groups, with competition over power and resources assumed to take place by and through them. Instead, we seek to explore how the political comes to be constituted, and the categories themselves, like the state and the people, come to be imagined, experienced, invoked, and performed.

The Problem of Rationality

Many analyses of politics and the state in Central Asia, emerging in particular from the disciplines of political science and international relations, have set out precisely to question established analytical frames. Anna Grzymala-Busse and Pauline Jones Luong have critiqued conceptions of the state assumed in political science literature on post-communist transitions (Grzymala-Busse and Jones Luong 2002). They question conceptions of the state as a clearly identifiable set of institutions and actors exerting legitimate authority over a given territory, operating collectively as a unitary political agent, with clear boundaries between state and society. These conceptions, they argue, arise from a Western European experience. Instead, through an analysis of the Central Asian situation, they present a processual approach that takes into account the dramatic changes following the break-up of the Soviet Union. They present an analysis that seeks to bring people back into the state and that acknowledges multiple, competing actors, both local elites and international governments and organizations. These various individual and corporate actors compete to create policy and fashion policy-making institutions. They describe the blurring of boundaries between state and society, a boundary that was consciously transgressed in Soviet ideology and practices of governance, and one that they argue to be transgressed in the post-communist era in the form of patronage networks and regional political identities (Jones Luong 2002). Post-communist states are a bricolage, built on existing formal structures inherited from the Soviet past but also informal ones, which are Soviet legacies of a different kind.

Kathleen Collins, also from the disciplinary perspective of political science, has similarly questioned conceptions of state and society that posit these as being essentially distinct, separate entities, and she attempts to show how in Central Asia they are mutually entwined (Collins 2004). She does this by introducing culture into the analysis. Taking inspiration from anthropological literature on kinship, Collins argues that Central Asian politics is characterized by the persistence of clans, which she understands as informal identity networks based on kin or fictive kin bonds. These are primarily affective, offering psychological support, but they also include rational elements; elites or clan leaders need a network of support to maintain status and political influence, while non-elites need clan leaders as patrons to secure access to jobs, trading opportunities in the bazaar, and education, as well as to obtain goods in an economy of shortage. She criticizes the transitions literature for too great a focus on formal institutions and elites and for assuming that traditional social institutions are incompatible with modern political formations.

Traditionalism is something that Olivier Roy also emphasizes in his analysis of Central Asian politics. He argues that the Soviet apparatus was re-inhabited by traditional patterns of political life (Roy 2000). For example, the pre-Soviet category of rural notable continued in the position of chairman of the collective farm, mediating relations of its members with the state, with the collective farm itself becoming a new tribe. Far from eliminating pre-existing traditional forms of social and political organization, Soviet rule institutionalized them within a state regulatory framework, giving them an economic and administrative reality. It was not so much the case that pre-Soviet traditional structures continued in their objective forms, but what he calls a habitus of traditional patterns of clientelism and patronage was reproduced within Soviet institutional hierarchies of governance and allocation of resources. Moreover, the national ideologies and narratives that form the core of the new state-building efforts are deeply rooted in Soviet nationalities policy. The post-Soviet political field, therefore, should be understood not so much as a replica of some pre-Soviet pattern but rather as a neo-traditional hybrid.

Approaches such as these that are founded on a concept of traditionalism might be criticized for presenting, albeit unintentionally, conceptions of Central Asian society as a traditional Other, opposed to a progressive, modern Western model grounded in a scientific rationality and founded upon individual, rather than collective, subjectivities (Dave 2007, 11). Such approaches can be seen to perpetuate a conception of traditionalism developed through the practical application of Soviet ideology, which placed traditional practices such as clan organization alongside what it saw as other pre-modern survivals such as the veneration of the shrines of saints or healing rituals (Poliakov 1992). These survivals were in turn viewed as obstacles to the development of a rational, scientific, socialist consciousness and therefore needed to be expunged (see Hirsch 2005, 215–221; Kandiyoti 2007 for an analysis). Both Collins and Roy, however, explicitly locate the development of neo-traditionalism in Soviet structures themselves, so they do not imagine a pristine or authentic tradition that reasserts itself in a modern setting. Both authors are attempting to deal with the important question of how the political is shaped by specific histories and relations of power that are expressed through institutional structures and what we might think of as culture. Jones Luong frames her answer to this question in terms of regionalism rather than clan or kinship. These are networks of patronage grounded in the hierarchies of Soviet government administration and the Communist Party, as they operated at the republican level and below, as well as in Soviet policies of korenizatsiia, the promotion of native cadres in their titular republics (Jones Luong 2002). Although they adopt different analytical frames, all these authors point to the postcolonial condition of the contemporary Central Asian polities by showing how the political is shaped by Soviet heritage.

Valuable and insightful though these analyses are, they privilege a certain kind of instrumental rationality. This is explicit in Jones Luong’s work, where she presents an analysis of elite competition as a bargaining game, in which rational actors make choices depending on their perceptions of gains and losses, constrained by available resources and existing institutional structures. It is also at least implicit in the analyses of Roy and Collins. Culture, clan, and tradition in their presentations of the political serve as a black box containing all the non-rational motivations and incentives, which ultimately boil down, in all these works, to patron-client relations and calculations of costs and benefits. The concepts of clan politics and traditionalism, described in an associated language of solidarity, kinship norms, or psychological affective relations, enfold and ultimately occlude the complex questions of why people do the things they do, when these actions are not clearly motivated by a calculation of individual interests, in terms that are understandable to the outside (Western academic) observer.

With the terms regionalism, clan, and traditionalism, these authors are attempting to account for the connection between elites and wider society. But the picture they present is of corporate groups competing to promote corporate interests (Gullette 2007, 2010). This simply transposes the rational actor model from an individual onto a corporate actor. Scott Radnitz addresses the political mobilization of local populations differently, through his investigation of the protests in southern Kyrgyzstan in 2002, which followed the arrest of a local member of parliament who had been critical of President Akaev (Radnitz 2005, 2010). Radnitz describes the vertical organization of committees to defend the MP, organized by his closest associates, which connected activists in the national capital Bishkek to village-level subcommittees in the MP’s home region. These village-level committees incorporated Juz-Boshi, informal community activists who were accustomed to taking a leadership role in mobilizing their neighbors in projects of communal benefit. In this way, the central committee leadership was able to initiate and plan protests and work through local authority structures and networks of sociality and obligation to mobilize protestors. Radnitz goes on to examine the motivation for individual village members to take part in the protests, which he identifies as norms of solidarity, reputation, and the threat of sanction. In the MP’s home village, participation in the protests was seen as supporting one’s own, but once the protests expanded to surrounding villages, Radnitz argues that the community exercised a tyranny of the majority. In order to maintain a good reputation and so remain included within neighborhood and village networks of material support on which many depended in this poor region of Kyrgyzstan, even reluctant or indifferent villagers were forced to participate out of fear (see Ismailbekova’s contribution to this volume for a comparable account of local performances of democracy).

Of all the authors discussed so far, Radnitz provides the most fine-grained account of the practical operation of networks through which national politicians can mobilize support at the local level, and his account is a valuable insight into this process. At the same time, like those previously discussed, his approach is limited by its language of community norms and solidarity. Motivation is once more a matter of rational choice and material interest, or undefined cultural factors. What is left unexamined is the contingent, located nature of authority. Authority is not best conceived in the static terms of traditional norms or local structures but as situationally performed and constituted in specific interactions (Rasanayagam 2006; Reeves 2008; Beyer 2010).

What we need, then, and what this collection aims to provide, is an approach to the political in Central Asia that extends beyond a limited understanding of rationality as an instrumental calculation of costs and benefits. We seek to explore how the scope for the political, the categories through which political action proceeds, the possibilities for how the political is constituted, are located within Central Asian lifeworlds. In short, we seek a cultural account of the political, but one where the culture concept opens out to alternative possibilities of action and experience.

The anthropologist Jonathan Spencer has advocated an approach to the political that is culturally inflected, recognizing that politics and culture are not two discrete things but that that the political emerges in located social practices and imaginative possibilities that decenter teleological conceptions of modernity and, we might add, rationality (Spencer 2007). He calls for recognition of the dynamic and creative potential of political institutions. His discussion of elections, political action, and violence in South Asia is informative. He argues firstly that politics is an expression of everyday agonistic relations; that interpersonal disputes that, for example, were fought out through courts and claims over land in the colonial period, because this was the avenue available at that time, in the postcolonial period are carried out through electoral politics. He argues further that the institutions and infrastructure of the multi-party electoral political system are themselves creative. Thus, for instance, communal violence in Sri Lanka is not just an expression of locally rooted agonistic relations but is enabled and produced by the political system itself, but in ways that are not intended by political parties or governments (compare Ismailbekova, this volume).

Spencer notes how anthropologists have, for the past two or three decades, become suspicious of framing their work explicitly as political anthropology. This disciplinary subfield had its heyday between the 1940s and 1960s and was characterized by a positivist stance that tended to exclude culture (Spencer 1995). In the British tradition of this period, the tone was set in large part by the project to establish anthropology as a natural science of society by figures such as Alfred Reginald Radcliffe Brown, a key member of what became known as the structural functional school (Radcliffe Brown 1952). Others, like Edmund Leach, Fredrik Barth, and F. G. Bailey, reacted against what they saw as an overemphasis on social structure and focused instead on the individual pursuit of interest within locally established rules of the game (Barth 1959; Leach 1961; Bailey 1969). Since the 1970s anthropologists have recognized that what we might think of as politics cannot be abstracted from social, cultural, or institutional settings. More fundamentally, following the post-structuralist turn influenced by Michel Foucault and others, the question of power has come to displace politics as the key analytic. For Foucault, power is not an object or quality to be held by individuals or located in institutions such as the state. It is a relation and an effect of the distribution of bodies, the division and ordering of space, the disciplinary techniques of surveillance, supervision, and hierarchical ranking that take place in modern institutions such as army barracks, hospitals, schools, and factories. By acting on the individual body in this way, controlling and shaping movements, gestures, and attitudes, it is productive of subjectivities. The interests that individuals pursue, the means and institutions through which they do so, their subjectivities, desires, and imaginative possibilities, need to be recognized as themselves produced within relations of power.

For the past two decades Foucault has heavily influenced anthropological thinking on the state. His analytics of power have led to a critique of the assumption, implicit in much social scientific writing, that the state is an object somehow above society and distinct from it. Timothy Mitchell draws on Foucault to emphasize the activity and techniques involved in producing two-dimensional effects; that is, the practices that contribute to constructing a world that appears to consist not of a complex of social practices but of a binary order: on the one hand individuals and their activities, on the other an inert ‘structure’ that somehow stands apart from individuals, precedes them and contains them and gives a framework to their lives (Mitchell 1999, 89). James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta (2002) have extended this critique to draw attention to the implicit spatial narratives that produce hierarchies of encompassment, where locality is encompassed by region, and region by nation-state. Penny Harvey has used an ethnography of road building in rural Peru to critique implicit assumptions about scale in studies of the state. She takes the state to be an effect, one that can productively be approached tangentially through its material manifestations. According to Harvey, such a tangential approach may well be the only option [for getting at the state] given the way in which the state is entangled in mundane sociality (Harvey 2005, 138). A concern for materiality at once locates the state in particular, located lives and reveals the constructed and fragile nature of the state effect of ordering and encompassment. While we attend to the way in which the state materializes in certain institutions, persons, and objects, we also pay attention in this volume to the ways in which such material worlds exceed the visions that are invested in them: the capacity of things, flexible or inflexible, sturdy or crumbly, to undermine official visions of the state or modernist projects of reform. We are thus interested in the structural and material traces of the state in terms of how and when they are experienced as enabling or constraining and in the dialectical processes involved.

As Harvey and others have pointed out (see also Abu-Lughod 1991), an ethnography of the particular does not simply produce a grassroots perspective, a view from below. Rather, the ethnographic method sidesteps spatial oppositions altogether by locating the global in particular lives, bodies, and materialities. The anthropological perspective, then, displaces the state as an external, encompassing object. It tends toward an unmasking of its imagined and constructed nature and emphasizes the process, practices, and performances that produce the mask or effect. It also points to the ambiguous, contingent nature of this constructed object. The state can be experienced as hierarchical and oppressive (Bellér-Hann, this volume), or subjects of regulation might sometimes be able to make deals and negotiate and manipulate the rules in pursuit of their own separate objectives (see the chapters by Cynthia Werner and Kathleen Purvis-Roberts and by Tommaso Trevisani). The state can be invoked as absent or deficient, just as it can be imagined in idealized ways (Beyer, this volume), or implicitly invoked as a solid, benevolent, and powerful structure (Morgan Liu, Reeves, and Laszczkowski, this volume).

Performing Politics

We seek to provide a culturally inflected account of the political in Central Asia, which looks at how the political is performed into being and how it is locally situated. A shift to a performance approach is a shift from asking what?—a question that presumes a unified form—to asking how? This approach allows for a multiplicity of action and interpretation, as it takes seriously the capacities for reflection of our informants. Thus, the perspective that we seek in this collection is one that emphasizes contingency, ambiguity, and indeterminacy. While a lot of attention has been given to the question What does the state do? or How does it see? (e.g., Scott 1998), our main interest lies in the question How is the state being done? This perspective allows us to also address questions such as In what ways does the performance of politics reproduce, enable, challenge, or naturalize ideologies about the state? What are the specific techniques of governance that Central Asian actors employ in this regard? How and where do these performances occur? and In what ways do they help produce or hinder alternative visions of moral community and personhood?

We interpret the term performance in a broad way as a mode of communication that includes but is not restricted to ritualized and public speech practice. Performances can be a means of ordinary peoples’ resistance (Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994) as much as an instrument of the ruling elite (Adams 2010). In the Central Asian context, performances have mostly been analyzed in terms of the symbolic power of the state (Cummings 2010). However, as a performance always inheres in the doing of things, we shift our attention to the causes and procedures of symbolism and less to its effects. Thus, we do not accept the power of symbols uncritically, or assume that their meanings are given, as this often precludes an analysis of how symbolism and meaning are generated in the first place (Strecker 1998). A performance approach draws from a social linguistics literature that insists that all language is social action (Austin 1962) and that meaning is generated in the moment when words are put to use (Wittgenstein 1979). Categories of politics, economics, and religion; notions of private, domestic, and public, are not fixed and objective. Such categories, as thinkers like Talal Asad and Foucault have argued, are the product of historically developed discursive moves to classify and control social space, to fashion particular subjectivities, and the boundaries between them are the contested products of the regimes of power (Asad 1993, 2003; Foucault 1991, 1994). Governing elites in Central Asia attempt to fix these categories and their boundaries through ideologies and narratives of nationhood, but as the contributions to this volume show, these moral and empirical claims only come to life in their performance. Thus, performances of the political are not simply the locus of instrumental rationality; they are also sites of material and moral investments, of hopeful expectation and of disillusionment (Navaro-Yashin 2002, 2003; Aretxaga 2005; Spencer 2007; Reeves 2011; Beyer forthcoming). Thinking performatively about the state in Central Asia allows for a more nuanced analysis of different aspects of the political, revealing how the state is the result of creative, multi-vocal interactions in ways that go beyond a simple opposition of resistance and oppression.

The following three sections introduce the individual chapters of this volume and highlight the ways in which the performance of politics in Central Asia results in a particular kind of state-making that is distinctive for this region.

Staging the Political

What unites the four chapters in the first section of the book is that they all deal with performances of a more theatrical kind; that is, performances on stage, in front of an audience and involving public dialogue. By systematically drawing on these theatrical metaphors the authors in this section have found a useful way to address the otherwise abstract concepts of the political and the state. Moreover, they also acknowledge that when politics are performed in Central Asia, people often use theatrical techniques, which are distinguishable from everyday behavior. While Goffman (1990) has argued that any occasion of face-to-face interaction can be interpreted as a theatrical performance, there are some performances that are clearly more political and public than others. To concentrate on these kinds of performances in this section is not to embrace a narrow understanding of performance as a particular sphere, a separate and separable realm, rather than an aspect of all behavior but to show particularly vivid cases of when and how the state is being done in Central Asia. We thus do not hold that a performance is only a certain type of activity, set apart from other activities by space, time, attitude, or all three, that can be spoken of and analyzed as performance (Carlson 2004, 13), but we acknowledge that people themselves choose to mark certain patterns of their behavior when staging the political.

All four chapters emphasize the importance of an audience in front of whom a performance takes place. Goffman’s definition of performance centered on this very element. He defined performance as all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers (Goffman 1990, 22). In the cases presented here, the observers actively contribute to the content of the performance, so that one can speak of dialogic performances. While there is little to no balance of power between the different participants involved in the particular performances, which is often regarded as characteristic of the concept of dialogue (Conquergood 1985; Girke and Meyer 2011), what is dialogic about the performances discussed in this section is that a multitude of voices can be heard, talking about the state. However, these dialogues all serve to objectify the state as a singular political entity. There is, in other words, a dialogue of form only and not a dialectic of argument when it comes to performing the state in the public realm. These performances cut across all social groups, lining up the actions of government officials and citizens alike. The dialogical moment in these performances creates legitimacy as it happens in front of and in relation to other people.

The stage Heathershaw investigates in his chapter on Tajikistan is that of roundtables and discussion clubs that have initially been set up by international actors, such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), with the intention of stimulating a plurality of opinion and strengthening democratic participation in public decision-making processes. Heathershaw shows how on this stage, the idea of the state as representing the general will of the people is pursued by all participants. In the roundtables and discussion clubs we mostly find government elites speaking to an audience of carefully selected civil servants. Even if participants formally represent a plurality of actors such as political parties, local NGOs, or informal authority figures, Heathershaw claims that these citizens are also often state officials in disguise. He continues to observe this tendency to speak with two voices and one mind also on other stages such as public ceremonies at border posts. The chapter investigates the means by which signs of the state are articulated and circulated, combining post-structuralist analysis, ethnographic approaches to the state, and Heathershaw’s own empirical material from Tajikistan.

In the second chapter, Dubuisson explores a living poetic tradition among Kazakhs in Kazakhstan, a verbal duel called aitys, which presents a positive and inclusive model of cultural belonging. These duels are performed on stage between two akhyn, or poets, who claim to voice the truth of the Kazakh people. The verbal duels take place in front of an audience and in the presence of the two poets’ respective sponsors. Dubuisson describes aitys (from the verb aitysu, to talk to each other) as an alternate form of dialogic leadership in an otherwise authoritarian environment. She argues that the aitys tradition evokes an idealized khan-like form of Central Asian leadership, where a strong ruler makes himself available and accountable to the people he governs. That model of rule is embodied in two ways in aitys: in the dialogic relation of poets to contemporary leaders, and in the activity of the tradition’s wealthy sponsors. In the end, poets draw from sponsors’ economic and political capital in order to stage their performances, while sponsors draw from the poets’ cultural and historical legitimacy.

In the chapter by Ismailbekova, we encounter Kyrgyz citizens who quite contradictorily perform politics during election day in 2007 in Kyrgyzstan by ensuring that the rules of the new electoral system are adhered to, even as they circumvent or even violate legally defined procedural norms. This serves to support the village’s own candidate, who also happens to be the main village patron. Electoral personnel manipulate and redefine the rules and conditions of the election in the interests of the witnessing and voting community, helping to elect their patron into parliament. This chapter shows that it is precisely such public political events that foster a local sense of democratic participation in state processes. Ismailbekova exemplifies how practices of patronage, discourses of corruption, and the creative appeal to principles of democracy are verbalized in local terms of fairness and respect.

In the final chapter of this section, Beyer investigates the enactment of the state in the neo-traditional courts of elders in Kyrgyzstan. The first president of the country, Askar Akaev, initially set up this institution in the early 1990s as an arena in which customary law (salt) was supposed to become officialized as part of state law. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in northern Talas province between 2005 and 2010, the chapter addresses the question of how it was that precisely in this institution not salt but imagined state law (Benda-Beckmann 2005) has acquired an important position. During public court sessions, actors situationally invoke the state as part of their concrete interactions by appropriating the language, rituals, and symbols that they associate with it. Beyer explores how this embodiment of the state and its law, coupled with a feeling of abandonment by the state, has led to a process she refers to as customization. Focusing on dialogues from inside and outside the courtroom, it becomes clear that an image of the state as above and beyond is constantly being (re-)created by all parties involved in the dispute.

The four chapters exemplify how a focus on stage, audience, and dialogue helps us perceive a public realm in which a particular kind of politics is performed that is characteristic for the Central Asian context. The authors in this section are interested in how public and dialogic performances, during which actors stage their very own interpretation of proper political action, can lead us to understand how democracy, corruption, law, and the state are perceived and acted out in contemporary Central Asia. As it turns out, the discrepancies between what is performed on-stage and what off-stage diminish when it comes to imagining the state: everyone involved in the action happens to participate in what we have called a dialogue of form. This form, while constituted by a plurality of voices, does not lead to a plurality of opinion but rather seems to (re-)create the state as a unified, solitary, and personified object. This proves to be a major difference from Soviet times where the authoritative discourse and the power of the party forced people to render many of their activities invisible to, or misrecognized by, the state by means of what Alexei Yurchak has called a performative shift (Yurchak 2006, 298). What we see in these chapters is the manifestation and (re-)creation of political action through dialogic performances on stages that are no longer dominated by one powerful actor alone. Moreover, state narratives are often positioned against the Soviet past even though they are in fact mostly rooted in this legacy. Likewise, a powerful image of the khan as the personification of political leadership dominates in most Central Asian societies (see Liu 2012). These narratives derive their force from the fact that they are shared by and circulate among elites and ordinary citizens.

Political Materials, Political Fantasies

If the first group of papers is concerned with the public staging of politics and performative enactments of the state, the second group draws attention to the fact that the state is also encountered, invoked, imagined, or desired in and through its material and infrastructural forms: in buildings and roads; in documents and checkpoints; in the planning, projecting, construction, and creative destruction of urban space. The ethnographic sites for these explorations